Discussion Topic

Glenn,
Thanks for the info and more to the point, thanks for your time back in 1986 when you spent part of an afternoon at your offices in the old sun tower walking Don and I through air photos of the W face of bute.

Bruce that's not the 'wolverine' story - as far as I know - but the 'stockbroker' story I alluded to I think in the Wadd thread.

Oy but wee're getting some kind of cross-pollination here, eh ?

The 'wolverine' story was when Mike D & John H were high on an attempt of Serra V ( ?stand corrected if wrong ) and they saw some climbers come into their camp....blahblahblah.........when they got down they realized camp had been ravaged by wolverines & , as John Clarke used to say, "....if wolverines get into your food stash they eat the cardboard and duct tape holdin' it together"

Okay maybe he said that about black bears.......

Anyway, John & Mike returned to camp to find NOTHING to eat & their stuff trashed. So they hiked to the hut ( and for those of you reading this thread who are unfamiliar with the area, a "hike" to the hut is a full on mountaineering experience + 4k or so altitude gain ) where they found A HUGE STASH o' stuff .........I think this was the year Croft/Flowermaker/Serl did the traverse ( 1985 ) and they DID NOT GET INTO THE FOOD - they waited for ( I don't recall how long )eating from those hideous bags of 'mystery remains' that fools tend to leave at huts . ( Good for starving climbers and rodents alike ) ....they waited for the fellows to get back to the camp & then they begged for food based on the story.

Thanks for the info and more to the point, thanks for your time back in 1986 when you spent part of an afternoon at your offices in the old sun tower walking Don and I through air photos of the W face of bute.

Good memory! I'd forgotten that. But I do remember long afternoons with John Clarke looking at air photos and maps, some at the GSC and some at my place, where we had 1:50,000 maps covering the entire living room floor and climbing up the walls. Now, with GoogleEarth and on-line maps, most people don't bother with that, but air photos and paper maps are still a good way to plan.

Allow me to second Mr Kay in the nomination!
Bruce -no good thread goes unlurked!
Hey in regard to the wolverine epic -i recall showing back up at the plumber hut with don and peter to be greeted by post wolverine ravaged mike and john. Per tamis' comments they had not touched our food-but they knew where every mustard tube and bagel was in every box! The ensuing party was quite smashing as i recall.
gf

I would also join Bruce and Greg in nominating Alexandra Morton for a Governors General award.
Alexandra is an amazing scientist and her research on the devestating affects of industrial fish farming on wild salmon is solid.
Some of her work is on wild salmon leaving Bute and swimming by toxic fish farms and picking up sea lice and worse. I had the pleasure of having dinner at her home in Simoom Sound on Gilford Island 20 years ago and she was a firecracker then.

Thanks for the Bute stories folks. Brings back crazy memories treeplanting up Scar, klattestine, Orford etc. back in the late 80's. Days when loggers were loggers and planters were... the enemy!
Seems silly now.

Way to go starting this thread Tami!
Things were getting a bit muddled between my green energy rant and the Wadd S Face thread.
Just got back last night from a great but depressing trip to Bute with bmacd.
Flew in from CR on Discovery West's Cessna 172. Had to ditch beazely cause BM was packing so much video gear and night surveillance stuff (That's a another story in itself!) Spectacular flight into Homathko Camp where we were welcomed by Chuck and Sharon, two of the nicest people in the world. Chuck loaned us a pickup and we drove up the east side as far as we could and walked the final couple of ks to the Heakamie bridge. Worked our way back checking out a couple fishing spots on the way. Nada.
Had dinner with the fallers (starting a new heli logging cutblock above Southgate estuary) and watched Luongo imitate a sieve. AAAARRRGGGHHH.

Saturday dawned bluebird and we managed to hire the 500D for a spectacular spin some twenty ks up the Homathko to the mouth of Scar Creek. Rigged up the fly rod and flung a purple egg sucking leach pattern into the junction of the Scar and Homathko. BANG! Fish on! Three gorgeous, silvery specimens of salmo clarkii ranging from two to three and a half pounds in quick succession. Pop the hook, pet 'em on the head and let 'em go. NICE FISH! I thought to myself,"this is too easy". No more fish for the rest of the day.

We checked out the run down and abandoned old Scar Creek logging camp. I hadn't been there since I last worked there with Jan in '84. She's gone now as many of the people I worked with in that camp are. Some tough emotions and more than a few tears as I checked out our old run down trailer in the married quarters.

Got picked up by the bird as the sun was setting and flew back to the Homathko camp. Bruce got to ride up front with the door off. He liked that a lot.

Sunday am, raining, clag to the deck, no flying home in this weather.
We hung around the camp till the weather broke a bit and Andre could get in with the Cessna. Bruce wasn't too keen but I assured him that Andre had to fly this hop regularly and wasn't going to take stupid chances.

I had told him the story of flying out of Scar in late afternoon one December way back in JR's Beaver on wheels. Jan and I were in the back with three other passengers and the plane was loaded to the max. We had to follow the snags along the Homathko to Bute where things lifted a bit so we went for it hugging the west side of Bute at just over stall speed a couple hundred feet off the whitecaps. As we reached the end of Bute the sky fell in and we found ourselves flying with zero visibility in a plane with no instrument flying capacity. To make a long story short, the pilot called mayday and CFB Comox vectored us in on their radar. For the longest forty five minute of my life, Jan and I thought we were goners and clutched each others hands. We couldn't see a thing till there was asphalt under the tires at Comox. By the time we stopped rolling and powered the plane down, it was dark. We all went to the Arlington and got puking drunk.

Our flight out with Andre was a bit lumpy but we got back to CR safe and sound. Back to Nanaimo and home to Squamish.

Hoping to go back in June.
Will try to contribute some more stories.
Hats off to Bruce for coming along for the trip.

Tim, I was at Scar Creek day before yesterday. You did a fine job planting there Timmc. The entire Homathko is returning to it's natural state. The forests are recovering nicely.

Due to weight constraints on our flights I took only My Canon XH-A1 and no DSLR's. I shot 2 hours of video. About half of that from the helicopter and fixed wing.

Now I have rather large task of making a meaningful video about just how damaging the Plutonic power project will be. The 8 year construction period itself, will industrialize the watershed to the point where no wildlife will be able to survive. Cement plants, gravel pitts, dozens of bridges, 3 lane 50 year roads up the Homathko, Southgate and Orford as well as the giant transmission lines.

The noise the turbines will generate for the next hundred years near the bountiful areas like the Scar / Homathko confluence will drive away any Grizzlies which survived the human conflicts during the decade of construction building the 17 powerstations ....

When people see the project scope on video they will realize how stupid this scheme is.

I met Rob Wood and now have a copy of his historical Coast range mountaineering book. The Homathko Camp is a special place, which has been running off of it's own 70 kv run of the river power plant for nearly 15 years.

Stephen Hume's column in Saturday's Vancouver Sun reported "Forecast not looking good for B.C.'s salmon stock this year". In 2009, only about 10% of the forecast sockeye salmon returns to the Fraser River occurred, and the fishery was closed. (The Fraser watershed is about 1/4 of B.C.'s area.) A judicial enquiry as to the causes is underway, but probably won't reveal anything more than the death of a thousand cuts. The federal department of fisheries and oceans has now forecast that the outlook for 2010 is worse than last year.

Important runs where below-average returns are already being forecast include: early Stuart, early summer runs to the Pitt River, late Stuart, Nechako, Quesnel, Birkenhead, Weaver, Somass, Nimpkish, the mainland mid-coast north of Vancouver Island, Babine Lake, Skeena, Nass, Alsek, Stikine and Taku.

What I am shooting is all geared towards my subscriber base on Utube so climbers may find it to be lame. Never the less, the more people who become aware of Bute and it's scheduled destruction, the better. I'll happily play my part however infinitesimal it may be.

The headline in the business section of today's Vancouver paper: "Plutonic pulls Bute project from Clean Call"

When you read the fine print, it's not quite so clear. They say they're withdrawing the Bute project from consideration because of lack of transmission capacity, but are still pursuing two projects in the Toba River watershed. They in any case seem to be just putting the Bute project on hold; Plutonic Power's spokesperson says "Plutonic and GE Energy will now spend 12 to 18 months further developing the Bute project, including advancing permitting studies and acquiring environmental approvals."

As to what's really going on, that's another question. Plutonic must have known from the start about any transmission issues.

this is a copy of a message I just sent to Chuck and Sharon at Homathko Camp.

Sharon,

I found my cell phone so no worries here. I think Perry and I are the only ones to have ever been to Scar creek with a high definition camcorder of that quality.

I have realized that all I have to do is post more HD video of the Homathko, and in fact I will paint the forestry and the regeneration going on there in a very positive light.

If you search the internet for video of Bute Inlet and the Homathko there are only ten or so videos of the area. 4 are HD and 2 of those high definition vids are mine. Both rank higher in a youtube search after 2 days than anyone else's stuff, if you search "Bute Inlet BC" from within Utube. All thanks to my subscriber base and viewership.

I dont need to risk anything or anyones livelihood by painting a negative picture. I don't even have to mention Plutonic. The videos speak for the vastness and beauty of your area on its own. My mission, which is clear to me now, is to merely propagate imagery of the area. That is enough I think.

Thanks again for the wonderful accommodations and I hope to see you both again this summer.

Regards,
Bruce

Even though my ratings and audience on youtube are far higher than FOBI, I really doubt they would want to be associated with the premise of my utube channel (bigfoot). But I can leverage that viewership to drive traffic and awareness to FOBI's cause.